Mammoth (8 page)

She would have found it a lot easier to ignore them if there hadn’t been a tiny bit of doubt in her own mind as to the morality of what she was doing. She was no technological alarmist and hardly religious at all, but sometimes at night she lay awake and wondered if she had the right to pull such a trick…such a
stunt
, on innocent beasts.

She wondered what Matt Wright thought about it. Even more to the point, she wondered just what it was he was doing in his sealed-off half of the building. Breeding and keeping elephants, that took some space. What could Wright be up to that took just as much space? Did it have to do with mammoths, too?

She’d never figured out how to ask him.

Now he was gesturing at his sandwich.

“Could I interest you in an Italian bomber with all the trimmings?” he asked.

“No, thanks.” She took off her hat and wiped her brow. “But I’d like a sip of that soda if you don’t mind.”

“I can do better than that.” He opened a small blue six-pack cooler and took out an eight-ounce stubby glass bottle of Coke, twisted off the top. A little foamed over the side, and tiny bits of ice clung to it. Not much else in the world looked quite that good on a scorching day, except maybe a beer, which she wouldn’t drink until almost sundown. She took it gratefully and drained a third, then sat at the table with him.

“I always order the twelve-incher,” he said ruefully. “Then I end up wrapping up half of it.” Susan realized he was talking about the sandwich.

“They’re okay cold.”

“So how many female elephants do you have in there now?” he asked.

“Cows. Female elephants are cows. And Petunia-tu is the fifth.”

“And all of them are…I mean, except Petunia-tu…”

“Pregnant?” She shook her head. “Just Queenie and the second one, Mabel.”

“And I guess you haven’t figured out any way to rush things.”

Susan laughed. “The old-fashioned way is still the only way I know. Twenty-two months. That would probably surprise old Droopy and the Martyr.” He knew immediately who she was talking about, and grinned. “They probably think we’re going to grow a mammoth in a test tube. Most of it is well-established veterinary practice.”

“And he will be…a woolly mammoth?”

She shook her head. “He’ll be half mammoth.”

“Sure, I knew that. But will he have hair?”

“That’s a question Howard asks me about three times a week. Hair, hair, hair, that’s all he’s interested in, that’s what this is really all about. Mammoths had a distinctive body profile,
lots
different than any of the three living elephant species, and they had longer tusks, and—”

“I thought there were only two.”

“No, for quite a while now we’ve divided the African genus into savanna and jungle species. It was determined genetically; they don’t have a lot of differences you can see. Anyway, I’ll tell you what I tell Howard. We don’t know. My guess would be he’ll be fuzzy, at least. He probably won’t have the really long fur coat the frozen sperm donor had. On the other hand…that donor did have a long fur coat, and that was a bit of a surprise, when we finally realized just what it was we had.”

Matt frowned, and shrugged. “A mammoth, right?”

“Yeah, but what kind of mammoth?” She couldn’t stop herself from grinning. “I tell you, Matt, if Howard wasn’t so obsessed with cloning, he could already be a celebrity. All he has to do is let Dr. Rostov publish his findings. This frozen mammoth isn’t like any that’s ever been found before.”

“Tell me about it.”

She hesitated, then stood and finished her Coke.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”

Temba had grown and grown all the last year. In California she ate even more, and grew even more. When the time of the year we would later call June arrived, she was so big that walking was awkward. She could feel stirrings inside her as the baby kicked and twisted, wanting to get out into the wide world.

And one day she felt a pain like she had never felt before, and she knew it was her time.

The rest of the herd knew it, too. They gathered around her. They pressed against her sides. They stroked her with their trunks and made reassuring sounds. All day and into the night they stayed near, and then the baby’s hind legs appeared.

A few minutes later the little mammoth was born.

He was a boy!

But he was not so little! If there had been scales to weigh him, he would have tipped them at about three hundred pounds!

Temba was very busy for a while then. Mammoths were born wrapped up in something called an
amniotic sac
, like dogs and cats and horses. Temba used her trunk to pull this away from her baby, there in the dark night.

Then she lifted the baby to his feet. He tottered for a moment, then fell onto his side. Temba lifted him again, and again he fell. But the third time she set him on his feet he stayed there, swaying and blinking.

The herd gathered around him and his mother and touched him with their trunks. Some of them flapped their ears nervously and shuffled their big, flat feet.

Something was wrong with the baby.

It smelled funny.

It felt funny. The trunks of the herd explored the tiny little ears and gathered clumps of hair that was still wet and smelled of blood from the womb.

And then Big Mama came over. The others made way for her, respectfully.

For a time Big Mama explored the baby. We can’t know exactly what she was thinking that day, so long ago, but if we guess it might be something like this:

(He is a male baby. He is a very hairy male baby. And what about those ears? What is the deal with those ears?)

Animals cling to their own kind, just like people do. And animals can be very harsh with those who are not of their own kind. Big Mama’s mighty nose and long memory were puzzling over the odd smell of the newcomer. Big Mama was the ruler of the herd, nobody had even tried to challenge her in many years, and nobody had any plans to anytime soon. If she decided the new baby was not right, it was all over, there would be no argument.

Big Mama kept exploring, and kept up her big, slow thoughts. Finally, she wrapped her trunk around the new baby and stroked him.

Well! Did the other mammoths feel relieved that the baby was accepted?

Probably not. Mammoths and other animals don’t think like people do. A lot of what they do is governed by
instinct
. And though mammoths and elephants are much smarter than most other animals, they do not think ahead like we do, and they do not worry about the same things we do. They deal with things as they come up, and since Big Mama did not decide to drive the new baby from the herd, no one ever had to deal with it, and so they didn’t worry about it. Temba never knew her baby’s fate was being decided by Big Mama. Probably Big Mama didn’t even know it. She just sniffed the baby, decided it was odd but okay, and then forgot all about it.

The baby himself had no idea what was going on, either. He simply knew he was hungry. His instincts drove him to where he could smell his mother’s milk, and he pressed his face into the space behind her front leg and began to nurse.

Temba was content.

And the baby’s name?

Well, mammoths did not give each other names like we do, though they could easily recognize one another.

But we can call the baby Fuzzy.

HOWARD
Christian held up the shrink-wrapped box and regarded the toy robot inside. It was a rare Bandai X-56 MechaMan, one of the earliest plastic toy robots to become really expensive, mainly because of the extremely limited production run. Howard wasn’t a big fan of plastic. Like most serious robot collectors he went for the older tin models most of the time. But he liked the X-56, and he didn’t have one.

This was the best-known example, and naturally it was sitting on the table of the unquestioned mogul of collectible toys, a man who called himself Radicon.

The table was near the door to a small side room off the main floor of the Anaheim Convention Center that housed the several dozen most exclusive dealers attending the annual National Toy Collectors Convention—the Nat-Toy—a gathering Howard had not missed in fifteen years. To get into this room you had to know someone, or someone had to know your net worth and credit rating. Toys had changed hands in this room for well over one million dollars.

Naturally, Howard Christian was always welcome. These dealers would, in fact, have been happy to grant him a private showing for as long as he wished, but Howard didn’t enjoy that. Part of the fun of a convention, swap meet, or even a garage sale was elbowing through the crowds, looking for the undiscovered gem. Of course, he knew there would be no discovery here. Every person in this room could quote the last known price for any of the top one thousand rarities without having to get out a catalog. You would pay top dollar here, but you would get top quality.

He turned the box over in his hand. One of several problems with plastic toys was that they had started showing up at
the same time manufacturers began packaging most of their wares in boxes with clear plastic windows so you could actually see the toy inside. Typically, the box would then be either wrapped in cellophane or shrink-wrapped in a more flexible plastic.

This X-56 was NRFB, and bagged in Radicon’s own protective wrapper as well, so no fingerprints could mar the original material. Because, though “never removed from box” was not the only criterion for collectability, it was incredibly important. Early in Howard’s collecting career he had paid thirty thousand dollars for a 1950s tin toy, took it home, unwrapped it, and threw away the box. He was stunned to learn, a few weeks later, that the value of the item was now about four thousand dollars. Which meant he could now never show it. Not that he minded losing the twenty-six thousand so much…but if he
showed
it without the box, people would realize he no longer
had
the box—it was the only possible explanation. And he didn’t want to look like a sap.

Most collectors would not view the presence of original wrapping as a drawback to a toy. They would happily put it on their shelf, or more likely in their climate-controlled sealed exhibition case with the laser alarm system, and smugly check the catalogs every few months to see how it was appreciating.

But when a toy is encased in shrink-wrap you can’t get it out without running the seal, and if you can’t get it out without ruining the seal, and if you can’t get it out of the box, you can’t…well, you can’t
play
with it.

Not actually play, Howard thought. Not like children play. There would be no bashing and tossing and stomping, no battles staged, no leaving it out in the rain in the sandbox. It’s just that, when he got something like a toy robot, he wanted to put a battery in it, turn it on, and watch it do its thing. Otherwise, why collect? Investment, so important to the majority of his fellow fanatics, was low on Howard’s list of priorities.

He did have a curator on his staff who was very clever with these things. When the man was done repackaging an item, very few experts could tell it had ever been tampered with.

But a few could, and many of them were in this room.

It was a pretty problem.

Howard noticed Warburton had approached him as he examined
the X-56. He glanced at him, then put down the robot and picked up a Pez dispenser in a clear baggie. It was the 1960’s “Psychedelic Eye,” one of the more valuable ones. Naturally it was in mint condition, and Radicon wanted $1,500 for it.

“Wright invited Susan Morgan into the gadget lab about an hour ago,” Warburton said, following Howard as he moved from Radicon’s table to the adjoining one, which held many boxes of comic books. He began leafing through some in the one-to-two-hundred-dollar range.

“Why do you figure he’d do that?”

“Beats me. He knows the penalties.”

The “gadget” was what they were calling the presumed time machine, for security purposes. They got it from the Manhattan Project.

Howard pulled out a Justice League comic and examined it critically through the clear plastic sleeve. He got out his digital assistant and punched in the volume and issue numbers. A picture of the comic appeared on the screen, with the notation that it was an issue he had in medium to fine condition. The one in his hand was marked very fine to mint, and cost $150.

“I don’t see this as mint,” Howard told the dealer. “There’s a chip right here on the fold. See? And isn’t that a repaired crease in the corner?” To Warburton he said, “Do we have it on tape?”

“That hardly qualifies as a chip.”

“Of course, we tape everything. There’s a camera right over the door.”

“A chip’s a chip. I’ll give you a hundred for it. File the tape away. If we ever need to take him to court, it could be valuable.”

“I already ordered it.”

“One hundred twenty-five.”

Howard took a roll from the light trench coat he always wore to sales like this and peeled off a hundred and a twenty, laid them on the table. The man scowled, but scooped them up.

“And you pay the tax,” Howard said, strolling back to Radicon’s table. He put the comic into one of the coat’s big pockets. The Pez dispenser had vanished. He took another
long look at the X-56 in the sealed box, then shook his head and walked away.

Warburton hurried over.

“Must have slipped his mind,” he said. “He’s very busy.”

“Sure,” said Radicon, solemnly, crossing his arms. They’d played this game before, and would probably play it again.

“How much was that dingus, now…?”

“Twenty-five hundred,” Radicon said, with a look that dared Warburton to haggle. He needn’t have bothered; Warburton would have gone twice that without a peep. But he couldn’t help thinking,
Fifteen hundred for a lousy little plastic pillbox with a hand holding an eyeball on top.
If he worked for men like Howard Christian all the rest of his life—and he knew he probably would—he would never understand them.

Then he hurried to catch up with his sticky-fingered boss.

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”